December 11, 1979

1979Rider Strong, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter^[†]

Rider King Strong is an American actor, producer, director, and screenwriter. He is best known for starring as Shawn Hunter on the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World (1993–2000), which he reprised in its sequel series Girl Meets World (2014–2017). He also headlined the cult classic Cabin Fever (2002) and co-wrote and directed the independent film Irish Twins (2008) with his brother Shiloh. He provided the voices of Brick Flagg in Kim Possible (2002–2004) and Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama (2005), and Tom Lucitor in Star vs. the Forces of Evil (2015–2019). In 2015, Strong was honored with the Young Artist Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award.

1979James J. Gibson, American psychologist and author (born 1904)^[†]

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.